Never ride your bike on the road facing traffic
Published 1:30 am Friday, September 26, 2025
My fellow cyclists, I want you to live. From conversations I’ve had with bike riders and observations on the road, there’s a question a few cyclists aren’t asking, and they should. It goes something like this: “Is it okay to ride my bike facing traffic?”
That’s a hard no. I’ll get to the law in a minute, but this is one of those things where the physical consequences are far worse than any potential legal consequences, so let’s start there. I’ve heard people say things like, “I ride facing traffic because I want to see what’s coming at me.” That’s understandable. But it’s misplaced.
Let’s consider some basic practicalities. If you’re riding in the roadway against traffic, what happens when you inevitably meet a car? Best case scenario, there’s room to move to the shoulder, but if there was space on the shoulder, you’d have already been riding there. The driver might be able to pass you, but narrow lanes and oncoming traffic would eliminate that option. Maybe they spotted you far enough away to be able to stop. Now you’ve created a traffic jam, and you still don’t have a clear route. Worst-case scenario, the driver can’t stop in time and is forced to choose between an oncoming car and an oncoming bike. Human survival instincts being what they are, you know how that’ll play out.
Even if there is room to ride on the shoulder, it’s still a problem. What happens when you meet another cyclist? I can tell you how I’ve handled it when I’ve encountered a wrong-way rider; I stay to the right. Yes, in order to pass me, the wrong-way cyclist will likely have to move into the car lane. I started out by saying I want you to live, and that’s true, but I want me to live even more.
Then there’s vehicle speeds. Say you’re riding along at 15 mph, in the same direction as a car driving at 35 mph. That’s a speed differential of 20 mph. I don’t have data on impact speeds for cyclist/vehicle crashes, but there’s plenty on pedestrian/vehicle crashes, which should be a decent comparison given the lack of protection for both pedestrians and cyclists. When struck at 20 mph, 90% of pedestrians survive the crash. If we take those same speeds but have the cyclist ride against traffic, that’s a 50-mph speed differential, and only 25% of pedestrians survive at that speed.
There’s also the issue of reaction time. In studies, an attentive driver will spot a cyclist from 1,000 feet away. Using the same speeds, that gives a driver 34 seconds to adjust when the cyclist is riding with traffic, and only 14 seconds when the cyclist is riding against traffic. But even the best drivers aren’t always attentive; a real-world distance might be as low as 200 to 300 feet. With a 50-mph speed differential, a driver doesn’t have enough time to stop. If you ride with traffic, the car behind has time to slow down and wait until there’s a safe opportunity to pass.
All this leads to wrong-way cyclists being about four times more likely to be killed in a crash with a vehicle. Wrong-way cyclists account for more than 11% of cyclist fatalities. That’s three times what it was in 2016.
The law part is simple. When cyclists ride on the road (including the shoulders), they’re required to follow the same traffic laws as drivers (with a few exceptions). That means riding on the right side of the road, the same direction as the cars.
Doug Dahl is with the Traffic Safety Commission and writes a weekly column for this newspaper.
